The New Yorker: Better All the Time

Today, in sports, what you are is what you make yourself into. Innate athletic ability matters, but it’s taken to be the base from which you have to ascend. Training efforts that forty years ago would have seemed unimaginably sophisticated and obsessive are now what it takes to stay in the game. Athletes don’t merely work harder than they once did. As Mark McClusky documents in his fascinating new book, “Faster, Higher, Stronger” (Hudson Street), they also work smarter, using science and technology to enhance the way they train and perform. It isn’t enough to eat right and put in the hours. “You need to have the best PhDs onboard as well,” McClusky says. This technological and analytical arms race is producing the best athletes in history.